Writer and editor, Susannah Felts. Headshot features her wwith shoulder-length brown hair, wearing black glasses and a black blazer, smiling in front of a bookshelf with colorful books and a potted plant.

SUSANNAH FELTS is a writer, editor, and cofounder of The Porch, a nonprofit literary arts center in Nashville, Tennessee. Her latest novel, THE COME APART was published by Triquarterly Press in 2026, and her writing has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, StorySouth, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is a contributing writer for Chapter 16 and an editor with SWING, a biannual literary magazine published by The Porch. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Arts Commission.

“A love letter to Chicago's indie music scene.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“Soaked with nostalgia for an early-aughts Chicago, this rock ’n’ roll novel is as lyrical as the music [Felts] writes about.”
—Chicago Magazine

“Quietly luminous and emotionally precise, The Come Apart builds to a hard- won sense of forward motion. Felts renders artistic life not as myth but as practice: sustained, uncertain, and essential. A moving, clear-eyed, and ultimately affirming novel about grief, persistence, and the necessary act of making something new.”
—Booklist, starred review 

Book cover of "The Come Apart" by Susannah Felts, featuring a yellow background and black silhouettes of flying birds.
Book cover of "The Come Apart" by Susannah Felts, featuring a yellow background and black silhouettes of flying birds.

Press

In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog
In Practice of Slow Writing - NUP Blog

Selected Writing

Essays

“In Praise of Slow Writing”
at Incidental Noyes

“Astonish Me: Anticipating an Eclipse in the Age of Information”
about the 2016 eclipse, from Catapult (later included in BASN 2017)

“Notes on a Christmas Bombing”
about precisely that, at Joyland

“Girl Genius”
about music and raising a daughter and the artists behind the band boygenius, at Longreads

“Girlhood Gone: Notes from the New Nashville”
about watching my hometown change (and changing, myself), in Longreads

“Search and Destroy”
about that time my daughter had lice, at Guernica

“Here are the Things You Should Worry About While Writing a Novel”
about freaking out, at Lit Hub

“If You Want to Write, Here’s the Book for You”
about Brenda Euland’s wisdom, at Lit Hub

Everything I’ve written for Chapter 16

Fiction

“My Friend Louise”
in X-Ray

“Map”
in Smokelong Quarterly